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Joanna Simon

Years ago, I went to Umbria to see where and how the all-important juniper berries were harvested for a well-known brand of gin. I’m not going to tell you which, because it doesn’t deserve any publicity — not even bad publicity. I smelt the first rat when I got to the departure airport. Instead of the promised handful of fellow seekers after gin truth, there was a gaggle of about 20 assorted hacks. From there, it was a short step to discovering a much bigger rat: Umbria was not the chief source of the brand’s juniper, nor even a significant one. Most of its berries came from Bulgaria, but that was thought too unglamorous to reveal (having been there, I knew just how unglamorous Bulgaria was in those days), so someone at HQ hatched the Umbria scheme. The whole fiasco seemed symptomatic of the dismal state of the gin market in